As promised yesterday and after 5 years of development, Vista is finally finished.

Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division has put together a video about the announcement where he announces the General Availability (GA) date of 30 January 2007 for Vista.

Nick White, product manger in Windows client also had this to share with Neowin readers:

"Ultimately, we never could have achieved this milestone without you, the enthusiast community, who have played a key role in making this the highest-quality, most secure, most reliable and most usable version of Windows the world has ever seen. You gave us unprecedented support in testing and providing your feedback while we designed, developed and refined Windows Vista -- so much so that it has in many ways become a reflection of your involvement."

On a conference call with Jim Allchin, Microsoft announced that they will have 18 languages at launch in January and will ship 32 within 100 days of English RTM.

Availability of the RTM code on MSDN is still not known officially with a Microsoft spokesperson citing "within 7 days" after todays announcement. Given MSDN has scheduled down time from 7PM PST to 9PM PST on Friday, November 10th - I'd expect it to arrive shortly after that.

I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Microsoft, its partners and OEMs and wish Jim Allchin all the best with his retirement from Microsoft at the end of January - good work guys.